The origin of evil is one of the great puzzles of philosophy and theology. Evil is no objective of the world order since there can be no objective to fail to meet an objective. To assume that evil is part of the world order would, however, imply to assume that there is an objective to fail an objective, namely to aim at evil as an objective to realize the failure of an objective. Nevertheless, one finds a positive will to do evil in the world. What can be the origin of this will to evil? The Augustinian answer is that it is the free will of humans which causes evil in the world. This free will is the cause of itself, it has no effective cause outside of itself. This position meets the objection that, according to it, human free will is the only causa sui, the only cause of itself, outside of God who is also cause of him- or herself. In Augustine, the highest in the human, free will, becomes the only cause of evil in the world. Alternative theories of the origin of evil are the idea that God or parts of God are the origin of evil or that evil is only there for higher objectives and therefore not really evil. The former position has two forms, the Gnostic and the Idealist form. Gnosticism assumes that God fell and caused evil by his or her fall. The Idealist conception in Hegel and Schelling assumes that even God had to undergo suffering and evil to become personal. Evil becomes in these theories a precondition of becoming personal. The theistic position in thinkers like Jacob Böhme and Franz von Baader is that evil is the result of superhuman, but not divine, will and of human free will. Humans are not the only origin of evil. Linked to this position is the idea that humans are not only tempted by their free will but only by their unfree will. There is in humans the tendency of overreaching and over-stretching their freedom and the tendency of not sufficing and underperforming their freedom, the tendency of the unfree will to stay below its possibilities. Both elements of a failing will, the will to overdo and the will to underdo one’s freedom, can be the origin of evil. There is the grandeur and the banality of the evil will as the will which is too free and too unfree at the same time. The tendency to emphasize only the free will in the human leads to elevationism and an elevationist view of the human, the tendency to emphasize only the unfree will in the human leads to reductionism and a reductionist view of the human personality and the social world.
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by ICER - International Centre for Economic Research in its series ICER Working Papers with number
06-2004.
Length: 22 pages Date of creation: Apr 2004 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:icr:wpicer:06-2004
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